Technik

David

There’s something special about underwater footage that’s hard to explain: we all have seen underwater footage over and over on National Geographic TV and with the rise of GoPro cameras, the technology is in everyone’s hands. Still there’s this fascination when you watch underwater footage, especially the footage that you shot yourself on a RED Dragon. You can feel the excitement when the camera starts recording, still in a dry and safe environment, and then gets dropped into the cool wet of a pool. The water that splashes onto the front filter of the underwater housing when the camera slowly descends under the water surface thrills us over and over again.

Lars Andersen at Hanse Inno Tech sent us for a week their nearly finished Celere 36mm T1.5 lens and the prototype of the Celere 25mm T1.5 lens. We did also some regular tests (mechanical quality is superb and the optical quality at T2.8 upwards is perfect), but were mostly excited to see how they perform underwater. Thanks to Kirstin and André at RED Germany, we got the chance to equip our RED Dragon with the first H2O optical low pass filter for RED’s DSMC system in Europe. Christian Schmidt at EWA marine provided us with their amazing RED underwater housing. We’ll do some more tests with the Celere lenses and post them here. If you have any questions about them, feel free to contact us or post them in the comments.

The outside temperature in southern Germany right now resembles a furnace, so the test of the underwater housing didn’t only promise some nice clips but also a cool refreshment. Equipped with those tools, we literally dived into it. And the footage looked mesmerizing. Obviously a better TRUTH’s Viola looks always stunning, but the 4k WS 72fps footage that she shot when she dove through the pool, holding the RED in front of her, the 25mm lens 30cm in front of her face, made us speechless.

So to sum the tests up: The Celere lenses will definitively find a market when they will be available in the next months, the RED H2O OLPF is a great addition to the DSMC system, EWA marine’s underwater housing probably offers by far the best bang for the buck when it comes to underwater housings and all those nice tools make whatever is in front of the camera look even better!